To hold your breath for weeks, is to reverence

the ancestors who survived the middle

passage. And the ones whose souls were left in

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Allori painted you so pale,

lips ajar with words just spoken

or a triumphant cry on air.

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We made jam in the kitchen,

the windows    flung wide

to let in a non-existent breeze.

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Spring was barely a fleck on the horizon

when we arrived, our tiny family a beast

asleep. You and I held hands and named the patches

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The year my father was born
Hart Crane died by suicide while
sailing between Mexico and New York—
Harold Hart Crane of Garrettsville, Ohio
whose body was never recovered since he
leapt overboard into the Gulf of Mexico.

My father would have had nothing to do with
a poet committing suicide after a steamship crew
savagely beat him for being who and what he was.
Horseshit, he’d have called it. Especially the gay-
poet part of it since I wrote and published poems.
I guess I’m afraid, he said once, that you’re gay.

No wonder Hart Crane skreiched Goodbye
and went over the side (and in broad daylight)
with one big, effeminate wave for the shit-world—
Hart Crane whose father invented the Lifesaver
candy, held the patent, and was a businessman.
Crane may not have told his father he was gay.

Just the phrase sucking cock would piss him off,
my father. If he heard it, he’d stop a conversation.
Announce there was no need to be so pornographic.
Wouldn’t let it slide. Not that. Maybe the n-word
but not cock—nothing having to do with cocks
or someone saying he might like to suck one

or take one inside him as an act of love and of
male tenderness for which there is no metaphor
only a past in which homophobia and 1932 were
acquainted. Just that, though: no hand-holding
and no one sucking anyone’s cock, then having
to jump the fuck overboard and be lost at sea.

She contained innumerable bodies. For ages, she had swallowed our deceased
so neatly. With woven roots and grasses, she’d mended shut the million mouths
we’d cut and dug into her skin. She’d rebirthed our departed into night-blooming
jasmine, cats, avocado trees, snow, razor clams, and delicate blue moths. But hers

was the kind of body with which nothing elegant could be done: we couldn’t bury
Earth in herself. She was a corpse we carried on a titanium trailer bed twenty-five
thousand miles long, joined to a ship six times her size. We towed her as we flew
into the luminous, grieving nebulae. Clusters bowed and winked. Some stars split

apart with reverence. A few blue stragglers stretched to touch her, grazed her left
cheek, Egypt, and her right, Hawaii. They’d never glimpsed her up close and she
stunned, like a slightly faded screen goddess. But who suspected she possessed
secret technologies? After a while, she began to regenerate. Fresh forests leafed

out, like the astonishing eyelashes of Saint Bernadette of Lourdes who had been
posthumously displayed behind glass for centuries. Earth’s new foliage gave us
rashes. Her seas teemed with fishes of a species we had never known, all inedibly
emetic. To inhale her wildflower fumes would crimp the valves of our wondering

hearts. Before, so many of her features had existed only to delight, seduce, shelter
and nourish. She’d been our Mary, giving birth to God each day in a kaleidoscopic
array of forms. She’d been our Marilyn, soft, yielding, compliant, her please-just-
love-me smile bubbling in the ocean’s foamy edge, her blue eyes salty, trusting us

not to hurt her in all the ways we did. True, she’d sometimes terrified with her
wild Vesuvian moods, but now she refused to be of any actual use. She fluoresced
with toxic biologies, conceived gorgeous poisons and feathered deaths, so when
we entered her clear enclosure the very air was stinging, and violent with birds, yet

we couldn’t just unhitch her. We came from a race of collectors who had preserved
relics. Our forebears rummaged in junk shops for dented metal lunch pails, shopped
online for antique plates, torn Levi’s and lockets, kept photos beneath the clinging
plastic film of albums, cherished the victrola and the autograph, stored stiff dresses

in cedar. Nostalgia was our nature. So she was worth hauling, evocative as a Coke
can strung to the bumper of an old Chevrolet, rattling on asphalt as Adam and Eve
drive away. We told so many stories about how she used to be, we forgot the weight
of her ripening fury, and failed to predict our abandonment. Somewhere beyond

Andromeda she quaked herself free, rolled off into heaven. There were never any
umbilical cords that we could see. Yet even with all the food on the ship we grow
thin. Our mouths ache when we gaze out toward her, pale blue, already light years
away. And we pine. Our tongues hang for the old flavor of her atmosphere, her rain.

Not raised in locker rooms,

he sees his first cocks

at the museum,

marble hardons a sudden

revelation to him.

At least

they look like hardons, he thinks,

feel like hardons later

when he imagines

how they feel. This, of course,

is how all art lovers

are born: in private

& for private reasons. When

he takes his first

sculpting class,

he learns to soften clay

in his hand. When

he closes his eyes,

it feels just

like

skin.

In the age of rising steel open me like a door

toward the orchard where ripe pears fall.

-Sohrab Sepehri

Slide the iron latches, turn my brass handle.

Walk through me when dusk dwindles

into deep indigo dyes. Forget your eyes

and feel for the frame, the last structure

before a garden assembles herself.

Here her fruit. There her flowers.

Her compost heap and spade.

Door is not a destination

and the moon is not helpful, so follow

night’s scent—salt, roses, duff and cedar.

As we lie down to sleep the world turns half away

–Elizabeth Bishop

I question whether it’s past time

to pierce my ears, dangle silver hoops,

feathers, add a small tattoo of a wine-

colored bird at the curve of my clavicle,

slip on a pair of stilettos, something low-cut.

All those years beauty wasn’t supposed

to matter. Now it does. I want what

I would have wanted then— a dress

on fire, love beneath the northern lights,

a river of curls no man could ever swim.

for a traveling circus acrobat

You swing here from the East
where nothing is dusty —

just diesel and domes. Where
church spires are syringes

flushed from earth like
strung-out doves, pinpricked

vessels of stupor. Here, cows
cluster in gangs. They chaw

and low. I wish you’d unhook
my blouse, sewn from spit

and calico. But aloft, you sweat
your way through your spiraling

grabs: hand, twist, air — hand.
The dumb meat weight of you

pikes, curls back on itself
like a peeled plum’s skin —

one scared to be caught
staring by the knife. Still

what’s left to risk, or fear? Fists,
maybe. Rope burn. The perpetual

stink of pigs and tractor grease. More
bars like the one you hang from,

showman. But the Big Top’s got
spicier acts than you. Lions seethe

on their stools, their tails like scythes
to slash wheat. And clowns boil

from their red-hot car. They pop
and roll like bath plugs, yanked

from scalded sinks. So, what
would it take for you to blister

your own way down
past the net — the shock

on our Midwestern faces? Are you brave
enough to strike

up a homestead here, in the flattest
form of sky? Fall upwards

at us, like haystacks made you
some sawdust promise: that a girl

would catch you in her
burlap sack. No greater show on

earth: not milk barns. Not flies.
No need to scream on your arrival.